Blogger, realist, clarifier, if there is such a term. Truth teller, who's not afraid to admit I'm wrong. Hellacious, renegade violist and "computer whisperer"; was once accused of practicing the Dark Arts with systems.
I'm tougher than most and survived things that would have killed most women. I still love life. I was homeless, now I'm not. Still in the 'hood, though. Nebraska Avenue, 33605. The stories are priceless and endless.

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Friday, August 31, 2012

ROW 80 DAY 50 – VACATIONS ARE FOR WUSSES

“Legally
blind” or “bland” strikes again. “Vacation for Wusses” is what I saw on my
friend Andi-Roo’s (SHAMELESS PLUG FOR AND, FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER @theworld4realz) blog post entry for today. As I was contemplating what type
of vacation my friend could possibly be planning (Lava skiing on Etna? Shark
hunting in the Alps? I hear the saltwater Crocodile roundups are particularly fun
this year) I start reading this post about how we need to exposeourselves to the more seedy sides of life. I’m thinking,
“Andi, Andi, I should have the immune system of a goat. I LIVE in the seedy
side. What in hell does this have to do with vacations?

Oh, VACCINATIONS!!! Now, I get it. Flu shots and stuff. I
still have a pretty decent immune system, I worked in a teaching hospital
during college. After about 6 months of weird illnesses, I never got sick. Now,
of course, I have all kinds of strange crap. I once got typhoid and salmonella.
Typhoid? Typhoid Mary, yay. I am my own meme. Geeze. When I worked at the
hospital, everytime some chucklehead showed up with the measles or chicken pox,
they’d test everyone to see if we had immunities. I’d had the diseases but not
the immunities. Then the Virologists and Genticists started showing up for
“samples” of my DNA. I decided to pass on playing the donor in “COMA.” I never could just have anything
normal. During my computer science career, I was working in Detroit, programming
tool paths and got Legionnaire’s disease. I always wondered if it was from the
French Foreign Legion or the American Legion. Whatever.

Sometimes
I think we’re going about this the wrong way. Rather than be concerned about
vaccinating populations, we should be more concerned with disease vectors
themselves. The paths and hosts diseases use to spread are far denser than they
were back in the 1300s when the bubonic plague first appeared in Europe.
Granted, hygiene is better, but with globalization and swifter travel, diseases
and man-made or even weaponized diseases could take terrific tolls before being
stopped.

To have a
successful killer, it has to be one that allows the host enough time to infect
others before dying. This is why Ebola has not been successful, thank God. It kills TOO
quickly, so it’s always confined to a rather small group of people. Not happy
to think about, but a horrible way to die. This is one of the reasons HIV and
AIDS has been so supremely “successful.” What a horrible appellation for a
hideous set of diseases.

As
Andi-Roo points out, the U.S. doesn’t possess a vaccine to ward off the Bubonic Plague.
The cure for it has always been tetracycline; just hope you take it in time. I took tetracycline for my acne
in high school, so I should probably be okay. As if, yeah. The plague is also more prevalent
in the southwest. The fleas on the squirrels out there carry the bacillus that
cause the plague and some of them have Pneumonic plague which I understand is
about 99% lethal. The Bubonic kind has a 90% kill rate I understand. Neither one
sounds like any picnic.

After the
plague was introduced to Europe in 1349, or thereabouts, 75% of Europe died.
The economy had actually been stagnating, prior to the great die-off. A decade or so later, the economy
started to flourish. Subsequent waves of the plague took fewer and fewer lives
as more and more people survived; natural selection at work. Along with the
plague however, people were still contracting smallpox and always had been dealing
with that scourge.

Smallpox
has been a constant in civilization since the dawn of man, but the first
recorded epidemic is Athens in 430 BCE during the Peloponnesian Wars, described
by Thucydides. Smallpox caused 20 – 60 % casualties, ⅓ of all blindness, and
scarring through the years.

In 1796,
the process of the smallpox vaccine was first printed by Edward Jenner, who acted
upon his observation that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, did not catch
smallpox. Before widespread vaccination, mortality rates to smallpox were high
– 35% in some instances.

I’m not
going to burp up anymore of wikipedia. The smallpox vaccine was a good thing.
The question before us now is, should we be vaccinating our kids willy-nilly
when there is evidence that shows higher rates of autism among children who are
vaccinated?

The
argument about the vaccinations is valid. If people don’t want to vaccinate
their children, they shouldn’t HAVE to in order to be able to let them in
school. Forget contagion. If a parent’s fears and a parent’s rights aren’t
respected, what have we become?

Itinerant violist and computer trouble-shooter for more years than I care to admit. While no longer homeless, still crazy, but with Labels *sigh* a bus-riding Asperger, bipolar-ridden, PD or non-PD, carbon life-form, providing fodder for Medical community. Not even kidding. Still ridiculous.

Acquiring a much richer and fuller experience and finding deeper meaning in day to day life, than I ever learned in a classroom, concert hall, or computer center. I will never believe that things just occur randomly, just monumentally disordered.

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Eventually everything happens on Nebraska Avenue. The pimps have been here, both the real and the political. The athletes and the artists. It's a life, a state of mind and it's home, Nebraska Avenue, 33605, 33602 and 33604.

THE DELIBERATE GOALS OF VIOLA FURY

Working on a project involving many flags

I Haz Home Naow - in Kitty Heaven

My Rent-a-Kitty, has become a Perma-Kitty, Mama, although she passed away, nearly one year to the day that Jim died. She actually adopted Jim first, then me.